News, Community, and Historical Thinking

What We’re Reading: July 14, 2011 Edition

This week we start off with a look at the new Alt-Academy careers website, Android apps for academics, and an oral history tool. Then, from the news, an attempted historical document theft, possible cuts in the Census budget, and a rethinking of Robert F. Kennedy’s papers in the JFK Library. We also link to articles on the role of community colleges in humanities teaching, further thoughts on Google’s failed newspaper digitization project, and the movement (or lack thereof) of senior faculty. Then we turn to good old-fashioned books, with thoughts on how technology is changing their form, what scholars can learn from novelists, a small furor over a book review in the AHR, and some dismal new numbers on printed book sales. Finally, just for fun, read about the history of the hot dog and the pizza box.

Oral History Tool
The Chronicle looks into an oral history tool called OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchonizer), which is still in development, but is meant “for indexing audio and video recordings, making it easy for researchers to call up precise words without having to listen to endless hours of tape.”

News

Attempted Theft of Historical Documents
Historical writer and social high flier Barry H. Landau sits in central booking after an alleged theft of documents from the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore.

Faculty Immobility in the New Economy
Noting that “senior-faculty movement has dropped along with every other figure in today’s employment market,” Leonard Cassuto at the Chronicle of Higher Education ponders what the end of the academic star system might mean for the rest of academia.

Books

How the IT Revolution is Changing Books
Robert McCrum in the Observer argues that “there’s hardly a mainstream genre (fiction, history, children’s books, poetry) that’s not undergoing significant change, attributable to the liberation of the new technology,” and urges readers, writers, and publishers to consider the “potentially positive aspects of this historic paradigm shift.”

Leon Trotsky Biography
Scott McLemee notices a review of a recent biography of Leon Trotsky in the latest issue of the American Historical Review and predicts that it “will earn a place in the annals of the scholarly take-down.”

10% Drop in Print Book SalesPublishers Weekly reports more bad news for the printed book industry—a 10 percent decline in sales in just the first six months of the year.